Archive for January, 2014

Put in the final two front uprights on the cabinets today. The spacing is a bit off – I got some math wrong somehow, but it looks okay and I’m not worried enough to unscrew them and move them. I’ve got three door openings at (roughly) 22, 20, and 21 inches wide in that order. Here’s what is looks like from standing height:

I’ve got a bit of cleanup to do from where I had to step inside the cabinet to attach things, but otherwise the front facade is done save for the doors.

A more direct look:

The top braces you see in the first picture are 4 feet from the far side, since I’ll be using four foot planks across the top. They’ll go in next, though I haven’t bought them, much less cut or stained them, yet. They don’t line up exactly with the front facade pieces, but they’re pretty damn close:

Yes, they are a bit wider, and no they aren’t stained, because (like the bracing strips on the walls) they won’t be visible.

As an added bonus, which I was neither planning nor counting on, the cabinets are deep enough to fit both 6-gallon carboys in line, which means I have room for just about all of my homebrew gear inside the cabinets. Including three of the four-plus cases of bottles (all of which are empty at this moment). Talk about luck… suddenly there’s way more room in my kitchen now that all that gear is downstairs “inside” the cabinets! And since that’s it’s new permanent home, I don’t have to worry about where I’m going to put it after I’m done with everything – it’s already where it will live. Once the coutertop is in and I can start putting together the wine rack bits, that will clear up even more room in the kitchen and living room where my wine bottles currently live (though I doubt I’ll be making any additional batches of wine). I’m feeling quite good about things – thank you snow day for giving me a work-at-home morning and a half “Administrative Leave” afternoon (which honestly will probably end up being charged as either sick or vacation time because I’d feel guilty otherwise) and letting me make far more progress on things than just adding two plans would seem to imply!

I just did some comparative measurements on the cabinets downstairs versus my kitchen cabinets. The space between the bottom faceboard and the top faceboard downstairs is about an inch and a half less than the space between the same boards in the kitchen. While this makes me really happy with my initial “guess” placement of the top wall boards, it leaves me in an interesting quandary. The space between the bottom of the drawer and the top of the cabinet door in the kitchen is only about a half inch, which means I either have shorter doors or shallower drawers downstairs, if I put in drawers, or really tall (about 28 inches tall, to be precise) doors if I don’t put in drawers. Aesthetically, I’m fine with that, but the design I want for the doors involves vertical slats making up each door panel, and at 28 inches, that leaves a hell of a lot of unusable planking. Well, not entirely unusable, but it would be difficult to repurpose it. If it were whitewood, fine, I could use it for hidden bracing in another project, but it’s finish-quality oak, which would feel like a waste if it’s totally hidden.

I think I can reuse the short planks to build out some wall shelves – perhaps wall shelving for the server closet? I’m kind of tempted to try to make another DVD rack, but that’s a project for another day. Okay, I’m going to go ponder some more.

I’ve made some more progress on the cabinets since my last post, though I can’t do as much today as I’d like to. I put in and stained the bottom interior planks, I’ve stained the exterior left side panel, and I’ve put in the wall bracing for the countertop. Here’s the overall look:

The fuzziness on the picture is due to misting on the camera phone’s lens – sorry about that.

Next up:

This is the view of the exterior side panel. Eventually there wqill be a board covering the edge of the panel that isn’t stained, so don’t panic. And yeah, I’m going to have to tape the panel and re-paint the wall. Oh well.

A closeup of the pocket holes I made with a Kreg jig that I’ll be securing the front top panel with:

I’d attach the top and bottom front panels today, but the stain on them is still sticky/tacky, so I have to wait. So far, so good…